Text Editing For Beginners

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* Pico (text mode only - for graphical use you'll probably prefer one of the choices above)

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* Nano (free, text-mode)

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: On Linux, you'll be better served by Nano than Pico. Nano is the Gnu Project port of Pico. It was originally created because the Pico license prevented distribution with Debian Linux. In addition, Pico is distributed as a component of the Pine email package, and not normally distributed alone. I believe most current Linux distros include Nano as part of the stock package. --DMcCunney 01/02/09

Text Editing for Beginners.

There are many good reasons to use a text editor rather than some other tool.

You will find that programming languages and web pages require pure text, without the stuff that word processors introduce.
Learning a text editor *well* can make you much more productive
Computers process a lot more text than numbers - it helps to know how to effectively and easily work with text.

Here are some simple to learn text editors, good for general purpose use:

On Windows:

TextPad (commercial)
Notepad++ (free)
boxer (commercial)
UltraEdit (commercial)
MinEd (free, text-mode)

Pretty much any of the CuaFamily are simple and work in the expected manner.

On Mac:

BBEdit (commercial)
TextWrangler (freeware) (from the makers of BBEdit)
MinEd (free, text-mode)

On Linux:

GEdit (free, graphical) - works on GNome
kate (free, graphical) - works on KDE
MinEd (free, text-mode)
Nano (free, text-mode)
SetEdit (text mode only, works a lot like Turbo Pascal or MSDOS EDIT)...